


Echoes and Orbitals

by mimosaeyes



Category: Wolverine And The X-Men (Cartoon), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, F/M, Minor Spoilers for X-Men: Days of Future Past, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-05
Updated: 2014-07-05
Packaged: 2018-02-07 13:29:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1900674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimosaeyes/pseuds/mimosaeyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aligned with canon; coda. Bobby remembers things he's never experienced.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes and Orbitals

Sometimes after a session in the Danger Room, he feels like he could go mad from it. The instinct to protect, to throw himself between her and any threat. His mind goes to images he’s never seen, metallic faces peeling apart into a deadly furnace, vaguely humanoid arms morphing into daggers that push apart his ribs. He jumps through portals straight onto ice slides and the air is already too dry but there she is, intent, ashamed, grateful, holding his gaze the same way she cradles him at night till his ice and his fear thaw out. Selfishly, selflessly, she runs away to save him; selflessly, selfishly, he fights to save her. They exist in circles with terminating tangents but she is his centre and without this circumference the whole world is crumbling.

Then he blinks, and she’s letting go of him, patting his arm twice before diving at the next obstacle and scrambling the electronics as she phases through it. He’s left there breathing hard, chasing the ghost of a memory across a featureless steppe until a gruff voice reminds him of where and when he is. But it’s never enough. At lunch he’ll be stroking Rogue’s hand with his thumb and watching too much of Kitty’s blood drip out from the gashes in her arm. Some mornings the skin around her eyes is so dark and bruised with sleeplessness he notices even when walking past her classroom. Those are the days he aches to ask her what she remembers, whether she believes in alternate universes, whether she ever feels like she could phase through the fabric of reality and time itself. Those are the nights he has to clamber away from his strangling bedsheets and too-soft mattress; has to doze lightly on the carpet in his room, surfacing into consciousness every few minutes to wrap his arm more tightly around a body that isn’t there.

When he feels his lips being brushed by her phantom chapped ones, it isn’t fantasizing, even if it makes him run his fingers through the streak in Rogue’s hair a little more the next day. He understands that care for her though he might, deeply and strongly, it would never be love between them. He could have her leanly muscled thighs intertwined with his legs and her tight breasts pushed up against his chest, and they would still only be children sharing a chaste hug, crying themselves silently to sleep, to a respite from alienated families, from apocalyptic landscapes. What they have – or could have had, or once had – is survival, and if that is no longer necessary in this world of hardwood floors and sunlit rooms, he is content to just be living.

**Author's Note:**

> Much artistic licence being taken here, what with the time traveling fix-it. Also, I have been obsessed since watching DoFP with this idea, but only now (amidst exams -.-) have found the words for it. Maybe.
> 
> Last line is indebted to the lyric 'I want to live not just survive' from The Cab's "Angel With A Shotgun".


End file.
